motionpicturefandomcom-20200215-history
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (13 Angust 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer, widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He directed 53 features films in a career spanning six decades, becoming as well-known as any of his actors thanks to his many interviews, his cameo roles in most of his films, and his hosting and producing of the television anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955—1956). Born on the outskirts of London, Hitchcock entered the film industry in 1919 as a title card designer after training as a technical clerk and copy writer for a telegraphy-cable company. His first successful film, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), helped to shape the thriller genre, while his 1929 film, Blackmali, was the first British "talkie". Two of his 1930's thrillers, The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), are ranked among the greatest British films of the 20th century. By 1939 Hitchcock was Hollywood. a filmmaker of international importance, and producer David O. Selznick persuaded him to move to A string of successful films followed, including Rebecca (1940), Foregin Correspondent (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and The Paradine Case (1947); Rebecca was nominated for 11 Oscars and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. His 53 films have grossed over US$223.3 million worldwide and garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and six wins. The "Hitchcockian" style includes the use of carma movement to mimic a person's gaze, thereby turning viewers into voyeurs, and framing shots to maximise anxiety and fear. The film critic Robin Wood wrote that the meaning of a Hitchcock film "is there in the method, in the progression from shot to shot. A Hitchcock film is an organism, with the whole implied in every detail related to the whole." By 1960 Hitchcock had directed four films often ranked among the greatest of all time: Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960). In 2012 Vertigo replaced Oson Welles's Critizen Kane (1941) as the British Film Institute's greatest film ever made. By 2018 eight of his films had been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, including his personal favourite, Shadow of a Doubt (1943). He recevied the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979 and was knighted in December that year, four months before he died. Biography Early life: 1899–1919 Early childhood and education Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 in the flat above his parents' leased grocer's shop at 517 High Road, Leytonstone, on the outskirts of east London (then part of Essex), the youngest of three children: William Daniel (born 1890), Ellen Kathleen ("Nellie") (1892), and Alfred Joseph (1899). His parents, Emma Jane Hitchcock, née Whelan (1863–1942), and William Edgar Hitchcock (1862–1914), were both Roman Catholics, with partial roots in Ireland;1213 William was a greengrocer as his father had been.14 There was a large extended family, including Uncle John Hitchcock with his five-bedroom Victorian house on Campion Road, Putney, complete with maid, cook, chauffeur and gardener. Every summer John rented a seaside house for the family in Cliftonville, Kent. Hitchcock said that he first became class-conscious there, noticing the differences between tourists and locals.15 Describing himself as a well-behaved boy—his father called him his "little lamb without a spot"—Hitchcock said he could not remember ever having had a playmate.16 One of his favourite stories for interviewers was about his father sending him to the local police station with a note when he was five; the policeman looked at the note and locked him in a cell for a few minutes, saying, "This is what we do to naughty boys." The experience left him, he said, with a lifelong fear of policemen; in 1973 he told Tom Snyder that he was "scared stiff of anything ... to do with the law" and wouldn't even drive a car in case he got a parking ticket.17 When he was six, the family moved to Limehouse and leased two stores at 130 and 175 Salmon Lane, which they ran as a fish-and-chips shop and fishmongers' respectively; they lived above the former.18 It seems that Hitchcock was seven when he attended his first school, the Howrah House Convent in Poplar, which he entered in 1907.19 According to Patrick McGilligan, he stayed at Howrah House for at most two years. He also attended a convent school, the Wode Street School "for the daughters of gentlemen and little boys", run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus; briefly attended a primary school near his home; and was for a very short time, when he was nine, a boarder at Salesian College in Battersea.20 The family moved again when he was 11, this time to Stepney, and on 5 October 1910 Hitchcock was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill, Tottenham (now in the London Borough of Haringey), a Jesuit grammar school with a reputation for discipline.22 The priests used a hard rubber cane on the boys, always at the end of the day, so the boys had to sit through classes anticipating the punishment once they knew they'd been written up for it. He said it was here that he developed his sense of fear.23 The school register lists his year of birth as 1900 rather than 1899; Spoto writes that it seems he was deliberately enrolled as a 10-year-old, perhaps because he was a year behind with his schooling.24 While biographer Gene Adair reports that Hitchcock was "an average, or slightly above-average, pupil",25 Hitchcock said he was "usually among the four or five at the top of the class";26 at the end of his first year, his work in Latin, English, French and religious education was noted.27 His favourite subject was geography, and he became interested in maps, and railway and bus timetables; according to Taylor, he could recite all the stops on the Orient Express.28 He told Peter Bogdanovich: "The Jesuits taught me organization, control and, to some degree, analysis."25 Henley's Hitchcock told his parents that he wanted to be an engineer,26 and on 25 July 1913,29 he left St Ignatius and enrolled in night classes at the London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation in Poplar. In a book-length interview in 1962, he told François Truffaut that he had studied "mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation".26 Then on 12 December 1914 his father, who had been suffering from emphysema and kidney disease, died at the age of 52.30 To support himself and his mother—his older siblings had left home by then—Hitchcock took a job, for 15 shillings a week (£71 in 2017),31 as a technical clerk at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company in Blomfield Street near London Wall.32 He kept up his night classes, this time in art history, painting, economics, and political science.33 His older brother ran the family shops, while he and his mother continued to live in Salmon Lane.34 Hitchcock was too young to enlist when the First World War broke out in July 1914, and when he reached the required age of 18 in 1917, he received a C3 classification ("free from serious organic disease, able to stand service conditions in garrisons at home ... only suitable for sedentary work").35 He joined a cadet regiment of the Royal Engineers and took part in theoretical briefings, weekend drills, and exercises. John Russell Taylor wrote that, in one session of practical exercises in Hyde Park, Hitchcock was required to wear puttees. He could never master wrapping them around his legs, and they repeatedly fell down around his ankles.36 After the war, Hitchcock began dabbling in creative writing. In June 1919 he became a founding editor and business manager of Henley's in-house publication, The Henley Telegraph (sixpence a copy), to which he submitted several short stories.37d Henley's promoted him to the advertising department, where he wrote copy and drew graphics for advertisements for electric cable. He apparently loved the job and would stay late at the office to examine the proofs; he told Truffaut that this was his "first step toward cinema".2645 He enjoyed watching films, especially American cinema, and from the age of 16 read the trade papers; he watched Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton, and particularly liked Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod (1921).26Category:Directors Category:Producers Category:Actors Category:1899 births Category:1980 deaths